GloPoWriMo Day 6: 'Hieronymous Bosch Painted Primarily On Oak Panels'

Prompt: Today’s (optional) prompt is ekphrastic in nature – but rather particular! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famous (and famously bizarre) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Whether you take the position of a twelve-legged clam, a narwhal with a cocktail olive speared on its horn, a man using an owl as a pool toy, or a backgammon board being carried through a crowd by a fish wearing a tambourine on its head, I hope that you find the experience deliriously amusing. And if the thought of speaking in the voice of a porcupine-as-painted-by-a-man-who-never-saw-one leaves you cold, perhaps you might write from the viewpoint of Bosch himself? Very little is known about him, so there’s plenty of room for invention, embroidery, and imagination.


Real life and illness decided to interfere with writing, so I'm missing 3 days which I'll catch up on eventually (or not). I happen to really love Hieronymus Bosch's work, but this was incredibly difficult to write because I was out of ideas as to what viewpoint I wanted. I eventually settled on writing from the perspective...of the oak panel that the work was painted on. An hour plus of research into historical painting techniques later, this is what emerged.

‘Hieronymus Bosch Painted Primarily On Oak Panels’

A Meditation on 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'

Chalk is a taste and so are colours –

Azurite, the copper taste of salt and sea and heaven, light as air

Malachite, copper-tanged like its sister Azurite but brighter

Bold as frog-skin, sharp as spring

Carmine, a musty, brittle intensity of crushed and dying insects

Ochre, cake-rich, earthy and thick as clay.

Oil, viscous and unctuous, swirled into pigments, seeping into cracks.

The master’s touch is deft. Gentle. Sweep by stroke by layer

The dark chalk underdrawings – the taste of dry dust and powder

Come alive on my surface -

I, this hewed oaken panel felled from a forest I will see no more

But perhaps relive through the master’s colours on my skin.

I taste. I feel. I rejoice in the sun that bathes this studio

The same sun that warmed me in the days

When leaves still grew on my branches

And the birds still sang.

Now they sing on my skin for eternity:
Flamboyant tattoos devised by the master
Outlandish, glorious, silent.